According to Mark Dean, a Visiting Researcher at the Australian Institute for Industrial Transformation at Flinders University, during the last decade, co-design – or participatory design – has frequently featured as a practical model for large public projects – with a significant engagement component. In short, co-design is an approach to design that actively involves all stakeholders – from employees, corporate and government partners, customers, citizens and end users – in the design process to ensure results meet their independent and collaborative needs and that the design is usable.

Mark Dean considers that at co-design’s core is the simple notion that because problems are complex, finding solutions means considering multiple perspectives to develop policies that address their causes, rather than just their symptoms. This leaves ample room for experimentation – and for failure. Key to co-design’s success is, in fact, to try and fail early so that the field of sustainable solutions narrows quickly and chances of success increase rapidly.

In an article, he charts co-design’s efficacy as a model of public engagement and explores the lessons of co-design’s approach to government initiatives in urban renewal and regeneration in Northern Adelaide.

Although first published in 2010 by Planning Aid, England the “Good Practice Guide to Public Engagement in Development Schemes” offers a wide variety of good advice about engaging the public in development schemes.

Good engagement reduces conflict, results in better development and most importantly allows communities to have an influence over the future shape of the places where they live. Engagement is a two way process of openly sharing and exchanging information, understanding different views, listening and responding to suggestions, developing trust and dialogue to support effective working relationships to the mutual benefit of all involved.

The guide covers the principles of engagement including moving towards effective engagement community engagement.

Dave Biggs of Metroquest has identified that one of the most important aspects of driving participants to take action is crafting powerful calls-to-action. He considers that strong messages are those that are concise and connect with people on a deep level. Here are some of his ideas to help create powerful messaging to drive engagement for a project.

Try Different Calls-to-Action

Your campaign is competing against the short attention spans of your potential participants. It’s critical to use the right language in order to motivate people to participate. Some things to keep in mind:

Different demographic groups will respond to different messages

Connect with people emotionally

Stories and images are more powerful than stats

Ask questions to engage people

Calls-to-action need to register in about 7 seconds

Listen to your target market early in the process to identify what their priority issues are and the language they use to describe them. From there test multiple options and see what works for each target audience.

Make It Front and Center

Your calls-to-action are key ingredients to any piece of marketing collateral you create. Make sure your message is highly visible and not buried under a pile of other text or images.

For online campaigns, use buttons and eye-catching graphics and images. Utilize a larger, bolder or different colored font. You should make it obvious to potential visitors what they should be doing. This also applies to positioning in e-mail blasts and social media.

Create a Sense of Urgency

A successful tactic is to let people know that there is a limited time for public input. When a website is up, people will assume it’s around forever. Start a countdown. In your calls-to-action and your marketing, let people know that there’s only a week left. Create urgency.

Be Concise

Your calls-to-action and even the messaging in your online engagement tools itself should be as brief as possible. For example, a MetroQuest Ranking screen title should be something like “Rank Your Top 5 Priorities”, not “Please Let Us Know Which Potential Community Directions You Would Prefer”. Be clear and use action-oriented instructions – don’t ramble on.

Relevance + Value = More Participation

Ultimately, everything boils down to one simple message: the more value and relevance you can convey in your call-to-action copy, the more people will participate. Time spent honing this message to attract your target audiences will pay huge dividends for your project. The strongest calls to action lead to dramatically higher conversion rates, and ultimately more participation.